Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

I'm very optimistic. I think if you would describe me, my pretty consistent affect is that I'm a pretty happy person.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

I feel about exercise the same way that I feel about a few other things: that there is nothing wrong with it if it is done in private by consenting adults.

Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and its good opinion...What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.